Tag Archives: angry rant

This is not a picture of Betsy DeVos. This is an orc used as a metaphor, something children will no longer learn how to use in the dark new future of education.

Orcs, as depicted by Tolkien in his epic work The Lord of the Rings, are an unhappy lot, hating everyone, especially themselves and their masters whom they serve only out of fear. Sound like modern-day Republicans? Well, that’s probably not a fair comparison. Shame on you for thinking like that. Although, I must admit, looking at the Secretary of Education that Donald Trump has foisted upon us with the aid of senate Republicans, there is probably good reason you might think that.

Orcs, according to Tolkien, create no beautiful things. They live out their lives violently destroying everything and everyone they touch. They are greedy, corrupt, disloyal, and generally the very definition of ugliness. And they have been the opponents of good public education for as long as I have been associated with schools and teaching.

Here is an actual portrait of DeVos. Sorry to spring something so foul and gut-wrenchingly horrible on you, but I thought you ought to have some idea how hideous this orcishness really is.

Orcs always tell me, “You can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at them.” What they really mean when they say this is either, “I can afford to put my kids in a good school that will only teach them what I want them to know, and I don’t think any of my money should be taken from me by taxation to pay for the education of poor people’s kids, especially not stupid poor people’s kids.” Or, more likely, “I am too dumb not to believe rich white people when they say the world will be better for me and mine if I let rich white people keep all the money they make and make all the money they want.” Either way, in Texas where the orcs have ruled since the Reagan Revolution first won over the rich white orcs that carry their orcish tribal banners all over oil-rich Texas, money has never been an issue for Texas public schools. There simply is no money for public schools in Texas. Over the past decade the State has always chosen to cut school funding before dipping into their vaunted billion-dollar rainy day fund whenever the Republican legislatures create a huge budget shortfall. And whenever there has been a budget surplus, education funds are not restored. Things like the fight against evil Planned Parenthood clinics take precedence.

Members of the Texas State Legislature

Now Betsy DeVos, who became our current Secretary of Education despite resistance from all non-orc members of the US Senate, plus two orcs, will now give the orc hordes everything they want for education. The federal Department of Education will be dismantled from the inside. Privatized for-profit schools will become the new normal and receive funding disproportionate to the work they actually do. All the cream belonging to rich folks will be skimmed off the top of the educational milk vat, and the rest will be left to fester and spoil in public school vats, becoming, at best, really really stinky cheese.

And so, let me end by saying, “Thank you, orcs, for doing such a wonderful job of protecting my children and grandchildren from the horrors of education and the ability to think for themselves. You have protected them from ever learning enough to pull themselves out of the poverty and slavish lives you have put them in.”

He’s watching. There is no safe place to hide. Well, that’s not true. He doesn’t actually read. He only uses a sifting program to latch onto everything in media that uses his name, and then he pounces with a twit-storm on Twitter, tweeting like an angry bird, launching his face and explosive personality at people he perceives as pigs. But the true danger, the reason there is no safe place is his army of Trumpkin Trolls who pounce and threaten and bully and attack with the ninja-assassin skill of middle-finger fu.

A fellow teacher, a college teacher of a popular human sexuality course named Olga Cox is under attack for saying Trump’s election was an “act of terrorism”. Here is the video of her supposed sin caught on the cellphone camera of a conservative non-pig student who was apparently being assaulted by her comments.

I have to admit I searched out and watched this video because I got wind of the Bill O’Reilly tirade on Fox News railing against it. (And what a foul stench wafted on that wind!) Republicans in the surrounding community are outraged by the “angry rant” this liberal educator used in the classroom. They are calling for her to be fired. Death threats have come through Twitter and email, especially since the O’Reilly “Fair and balanced” angry rant. One lovely Trumpkin sent her a picture of her own house complete with address and the email called Cox a “libtard, Marxist, hatemonger, nutcase” and said “her home address is now going to be sent everywhere.”

Far be it for me to defend a hatemonger, but as I listened to the rant, I was struck by the soft, supportive tone of voice the teacher was using. This was a human sexuality class, and obviously some students take it because of their own sometimes hidden homosexuality. She has had many students find the courage to come out of the closet because of that tone of voice and the supportive caring environment she tries to create. Not only that, some of her students are part of a minority or religious group that have good reason to be nervous about Trump and Mike Pence taking over the reigns of the government sleigh and slapping the reindeer that pull it with considerable force to get them on the way with deporting illegals, reversing LGBT rights, and other loving conservative threats made because… well, we just don’t seem to know how to live our lives, and government should deregulate everything except our personal lives.

Here is another video to clue you in on the Marxist, nutcase dialogue that goes on in this teacher’s class;

I mean, it sounds to me like she is promising to keep students safe from hate-filled bullying, and offers phone numbers and links that students can use to find refuge. How exactly is that being a hypocrite? I really believe we need more teachers like this one, not less. Her right to say these things should be protected.

After all, this last Presidential campaign was filled with instances of unacceptable hateful speech that was lauded as “not politically correct” because being politically correct does not mean “not trying to offend anyone”, but is somehow a horrible weapon that gores the side of conservatives like a bull in a China shop and must be rooted out of our society with bulldozers of invective.

I am sorry that the poor conservative child who videoed this was so injured by it that it had to be posted on the internet to go viral and force this teacher to leave her job for the rest of the semester and contemplate leaving permanently. But the conservatives tell me that college kids are too obsessed with “safe spaces” where they can go when their “soft little liberal feelings are hurt”. Obviously conservatives feel that these safe spaces have to go. This story in the Orange County Register obviously shows how they are tracking down and attempting to remove them.

But if that is really the case, then who is really the hypocrite here?

There are people in this world who are driven by greed and a sense that they have nothing to lose by risking everything to take what belongs to you. They swoop in on their fast pirate ships, swing on board your little boat, hurt you, steal what you have, and eventually kill you. Movies romanticize swashbucklers as somebody who takes from the rich and the villainous as a sort of cosmic comeuppance. But the reality is they are criminals and murderers.

But they don’t carry swords any more.

They are the CEOs of banks.

Bank-o’ Merricka is an excellent example who sailed their Jolly Roger right up to the gunwales of my little boat. I underwent a debt reduction program because of five hospital stays in five years that drained my personal treasury. $35,000 in credit card debt reduced and paid off in three years. But Bank-o’ Merricka, after they learned I would not be able to pay all the interest I owed, immediately stopped calling. The debt disappeared from my account. They had sold the debt to a debt collector and quietly sat on the bill as I paid everything else off. Then, they filed a lawsuit for the entire amount I owed, plus interest, and plus legal fees. If I hadn’t hired a lawyer and fought the lawsuit, they would’ve won the entire amount by default. That’s how they clean out most of their victims and prey, because people generally surrender to pirates who come over the rails with swords in their teeth and burning cannon fuses in their beards.

I may still lose the battle in this boarding action, but at least I haven’t simply surrendered. But there are other pirate ships circling my little boat as well. My evil health insurance company are also buccaneers, and they demand higher and higher premiums and co-pays, and routinely deny all claims. Diabetic supply people keep calling me and offering free meters and stuff the health insurance pirates are supposed to cover one hundred per cent. I just paid them $260 dollars of a $500 dollar scam bill that hit my little boat like a cannon shot.

So, the pirates are out there. I am still fighting off the boarders. But I think my little boat is sinking.

I have not been having good days lately. Things go wrong constantly. Things that cost money that I don’t have. I’m a writer, after all. I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.

Fire ants bit me on Tuesday. My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps. At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired. If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed. Well, welcome back to Debt Town. At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter. And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks. I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton. I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones. We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.

It is now official. I hate health insurance companies more than I hate the high cost of health care. I appreciate the emergency room that saved my son’s life a year ago in February. But I am still trying to pay for it. I am practically bankrupted by five ER visits in the last four years. Only one of those was mine. Health insurance does not approve ER costs for a whole list of health problems. And that was a better insurance than we have this school year.

In order to get my son out of the Health Facility that the ER sent him to, I had to arrange a doctor and a therapist before they would even discuss releasing him. I did that. My son reached a level of recovery that they could have authorized his release after one three-day weekend, but of course, the kept him for ten days… all of which I had to pay for out of pocket at hospital rates. The doctor I arranged for saw my son every three months after that to maintain his recovery and prescribe the best possible medicine. He was one of the best doctors in his field and he helped immensely. The therapist was even more helpful, being able to teach my son how to handle the symptoms and complications of his condition. He was also worth his weight in gold.

But then the State of Texas decided the health insurance that teachers got through their school districts on State funding’s dime was much too good. The wise and noble Emperor Perry of Texas decided to hand State employee health care over to Faetna ( a fake name that rhymes precisely with the corporation’s real name if you just drop the letter F). Wonderful doctor does not even deal with the pirates of Faetna. They swing into any and all health care situations on boarding ropes and slash at anything that moves with their cutlasses of problem-making. So I had to get a new doctor. The doctors in this particular field of medicine are not abundant to begin with. Aetna… er, I mean Faetna, decided that we could only use doctors that were associated with the same hospital where we visited the ER. Well, I asked them to give me names of the doctors who qualified. I got three names. I made an appointment. We were filling out the paperwork in the doctor’s office twenty minutes before seeing the doctor. The receptionist interrupted after I had half-way finished the mountainous paperwork to tell me the insurance had rejected payment. This doctor that THEY had recommended to me was not a part of the approved network. They took Faetna insurance, but Faetna refused to pay. The same day I called the other doctors on the list. No doctor recommended to me by the insurance company was part of the required plan. There were no doctors in the city who did qualify.

Okay. It can’t get worse. We still had the therapist who was working miracles for my son. He took Faetna insurance. There was no problem there, right? But wait. The pirate captains of Faetna took another look. They started rejecting his claims too. Soon there was a huge yellow envelope full of demands for clinical records to justify the need for the therapist. I went to the ER, to the wonderful doctor, to the hospital in Denton where they were still taking my money away from me, and to the therapist himself. We gathered documents. The lovely hospital charged me $50 for paperwork and made me drive all the way there to Denton twice to accomplish it. I got all the materials compiled, overnighted them to the insurance company’s disapproval department, and everything should’ve been fine. But. of course, it wasn’t. The claims for services were denied. I am expected to pay out of pocket. They found no clinical evidence that the services were essential and they insisted I pay the bills without help from them.

So, I am left marveling at the ingenuity of the insurance-pirate racket. Every month we pay for all five us, hefty premiums because we have health issues that need to be prepared for, and when the problems arise, and we ask them to pay their promised share… we have issues, and we get denied. I have been shanghaied by the pirates of Aetna… er, I mean Faetna.